Amid worsening security conditions in Ethiopia, the United States State Department on Tuesday urged its citizens living in Ethiopia to leave the country immediately, reported The BBC.
The US State Department warned that the government has no plans to facilitate a mass evacuation via military or commercial aircraft, as it did in Afghanistan.
“There are no plans to fly the US military into Ethiopia to facilitate evacuations or replicate the contingency effort we recently undertook in Afghanistan, which was a unique situation for many reasons,” a senior US State Department official told reporters.
Zambia became the first African nation to begin airlifting its citizens out of Ethiopia last week.
The US and the African Union have been pressuring the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan rebel groups to end their conflict, which has killed several thousand people and displaced two million since it began a year ago.
Last year in November, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed ordered an attack on the restive region of Tigray in his country’s north to punish leaders of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) for an attack on a military camp.
Abiy, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, promised it would be a swift victory for his forces. But, the conflict is still raging. The TPLF has made a big comeback and taken key cities including the regional capital of Mekelle. Now the rebels have set their sights on the capital city of Addis Ababa.
On Tuesday, the United Nations said about 1,000 people have been detained in cities across Ethiopia in the past week.
The Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency earlier this month. The declaration, which is valid for six months, allows the security forces to detain suspects without any trial for as long as the state of emergency lasts and to conduct house-to-house searches without a warrant.
